Making Music Tech Open Source

Principal Investigator
Ian Hattwick, Music and Theater Arts
Fund: Alumni Class Funds
Funding Period: AY2024
Department/Lab/Center: Music and Theater Arts

Music technology as a research field has relied on an array of music-specific programming environments. Music tech researchers utilize these environments to explore a wide variety of topics, including instrument design, sound synthesis, spatial audio, AI/ML tools, music cognition, physical modeling, etc. This project begins the transition of much of MIT’s music tech curriculum to use WebAudio, an open-source framework for working with audio in the browser. Continued development of browser-based audio frameworks not only allow for advanced analysis and synthesis, but also make it easy to integrate browser-based audio in a wide variety of software projects. This project will provide a framework to support the pedagogy of music tech concepts in a format which students will be able to easily bring with them to other MIT courses or professional projects.